In the mailing field, there are two requirements for the preparation of a mail piece that is to be posted by the postal service. There must be postage applied to the mail piece and there must be an address to which the mail piece is to be sent. A large portion of first class letter mail received by the postal service for delivery is imprinted with a postage indicia that indicates there has been an accounting for the payment of postage. The postage indicia is printed with a fluorescent ink which allows the postal service to not only assure that the indicia is authentic, but also assists the postal service in orienting mail pieces.
In the area of addressing, the postal service for years has been automating mail delivery processing by reading the address on mail pieces by machine. Initially, the postal service relied on the postnet code, which is a bar code, for the purpose of determining the zip code to which a mail piece is to be sent. This is accomplished with a bar code reader. In a more recent development, the postal service has been using optical character readers for reading the addresses in the address blocks of mail pieces. Clearly, the inks that are used to print addresses and postnet bar codes require high contrast with the background of the mail piece and good resolution in printing the bar codes and alphanumerics.
In the past, the printing of a postage indicia and the printing of an address and other information on a mail piece have been performed by different printing mechanisms. The latter includes the printing of data for evidencing the authenticity of the postage. The inks used for printing the postage indicia are required to be fluorescent; whereas, inks for printing other data had to be machine readable. Because of the different requirements of the inks for printing postage indicia and printing other data on a mail piece, the operations had to be performed separately. Along with the use of the two different printers, the indicia and other data were located on different areas of a mail piece. Clearly, it would be advantageous to provide a single printer that prints both the postage indicia and machine readable data. It also would be advantageous to print postage verification in the indicia block as well as postage information.